Keywords: the book, rhizome-book, Deleuze and Guattari, Mao Zedong, Russian Futurism, Antonin Artaud, Situationist International Deleuze Studies 7.1 (2013): 53–82 DOI: 10.3366/dls.2013.0094
The Strangest Cult: Material Forms of the Political Book through Deleuze and Guattari
Nicholas Thoburn University of Manchester
Abstract This article investigates the complex object of the political book. Mobilising Deleuze and Guattari’s typology of the book, the article assesses the material properties of four specific books (or sets of books): Mao Zedong’s ‘Little Red Book’, Russian Futurist books, Antonin Artaud’s paper ‘spells’, and Guy Debord and Asger Jorn’s ‘anti-book’ Mémoires. Highly critical of the dominant mode of the political book, what they call the ‘root-book’, Deleuze and Guattari draw attention to the troubling religious structures and passions that order its field. Here the book internalises the world as the origin and source of truth and authority – a mode of existence as dear to the avant-garde as it is to religious formations: ‘Wagner, Mallarmé, and Joyce, Marx and Freud: still Bibles.’ But the book also features in Deleuze and Guattari’s counter-figure of the ‘rhizome-book’, where they foreground the dynamic materiality of this medium: ‘A book has neither object nor subject; it is made of variously formed matters, and very different dates and speeds.’ The rhizome-book is an enticing concept for assessing the political book, yet Deleuze and Guattari pay little attention to the specific, concrete attributes of this medium. In focusing on the properties of particular books this article seeks to address that absence, and so contribute to an understanding of the political book that is fully engaged with its material forms.

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2024-06-27